Jordan-Elbridge school district interim Superintendent Larry Zacher and Paula VanMinos, the district's director of operations, work on a presentation during a budget hearing held Tuesday at Ramsdell Middle School in Jordan. The district gave VanMinos a contract that includes a guarantee three-year salary payment whether the board approves her for tenure or not.
By John O'Brien
and Fernando Alfonso III
Staff writers
Unlike other school administrators across the state, Paula VanMinos doesn’t have to worry about tenure.
The Jordan-Elbridge school district’s director of operations has five months before she’s eligible for the treasured status that protects public school employees from being fired without reason.
Instead of relying on the state law that guides tenure, VanMinos improved her chances in her new contract with the district.
You can read the contract below
First, she negotiated a clause that forces the school superintendent and board to decide early — before a new superintendent and three new board members take over.
Update: Board to meet Monday
The Jordan-Elbridge school board will hold a special meeting Monday night to discuss Paula VanMinos' contract and her relationship with her boss, interim Superintendent Lawrence Zacher.
Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES Superintendent Bill Speck, who is leading Jordan-Elbridge’s search for a permanent superintendent, said the board is planning to meet Monday night to discuss The Post-Standard's story about VanMinos’ contract.
The time and location of the special board meeting had not been decided Sunday afternoon.
- Staff writer Catie O'Toole
Second, VanMinos sealed the deal with a twist that’s unheard-of, according to experts: If tenure is rescinded or not granted, VanMinos gets her full salary for three years: $308,000.
Three new board members will take office at the end of June in a district that’s been besieged by troubles for nearly a year. Two administrators are on paid suspension and the district treasurer was fired last year. The superintendent was forced out. And a series of lawsuits has alleged illegal meetings and other wrongdoing.
But no matter what the new bosses think of her work, VanMinos will get three years’ pay. The new board would be hamstrung under the contract VanMinos signed in February and disclosed for the first time Friday.
State education law says school districts cannot grant tenure until a central school district employee has worked in the district for three years. A school board may grant preliminary tenure, as long as it’s not effective until after the three-year period.
Typically, that early approval is done through resolutions that can be rescinded by the board. Education lawyers and other experts said they were unaware of another case in which the early tenure option was guaranteed through the force of an employee’s contract.
“Is that a joke?” asked Alfred Riccio when the tenure provision was read to him.
He's the executive director of the New York State Association of Management Advocates for School Labor Affairs, whose members negotiate contracts on behalf of school boards.
A contract that ties the hands of a school board with the threat of a $300,000 obligation if it doesn’t grant tenure appears to be an improper gift of public money, said Riccio, who said he’s negotiated hundreds of contracts for school districts over the past 38 years.
“It’s almost like blackmail,” he said. “They’re basically saying to the next board: ‘If you try to deny her tenure, it’s going to be a $300,000 penalty.’”
Riccio said he was unaware of any contract with a clause dictating tenure in any way.
Jerome Melvin, a longtime school superintendent in that position in the North Syracuse district, said he’d never heard of a tenure clause in an employee’s contract.
A model contract for assistant superintendents, published by the New York State Council of School Superintendents, includes no tenure clause. The contracts of two Jordan-Elbridge assistant superintendents also have no such clause.
“It’s not for me to worry about in any other contract,” VanMinos said. “I only negotiate my own contract.”
She said she knows of two other school administrators outside the Jordan-Elbridge district who have the tenure clause in their contracts. She would not identify those administrators.
VanMinos said she started to negotiate the contract in June with then-Superintendent Marilyn Dominick. Dominick said she was unaware of the tenure clause and other unusual provisions in VanMinos’ contract until seeing it for the first time last week.
“This is a very, very sweet deal for her,” said Dominick, who resigned Nov. 1.
Dominick said she was forced out because board members wanted her to bring unwarranted discipline against some employees.
If the tenure clause had been part of her negotiations with VanMinos, Dominick would’ve remembered, she said.
“Absolutely,” Dominick said. “I would’ve fought against it.”
VanMinos and Dominick agreed their negotiations fell apart over one clause about tuition reimbursements.
VanMinos said she does not know how much of the contract Dominick was aware of.
“I was not part of the meeting between her and the board” over the proposed contract, VanMinos said. “I do not know what she was told or not told.”
VanMinos said she doesn’t know when the tenure clause first surfaced, but that, “obviously, I didn’t come up with that on my own.” She would not answer questions about who did.
The district’s interim superintendent, Lawrence Zacher, said in an interview Friday that he reviewed the contract before he signed it Feb. 3 and recommended the board approve it, including a $21,000 raise for VanMinos. He said he did not negotiate the terms.
In videotaped comments at a public meeting in March, Zacher said one of his many tasks when he started in November was to finish negotiating VanMinos’ contract.
In an interview Friday with VanMinos, Zacher and board member Connie Drake, The Post-Standard asked Zacher and VanMinos about their personal relationship. In recent weeks, the newspaper observed VanMinos many times arriving at Zacher’s apartment on West Lake Road, in Skaneateles, in the evening, going inside, then leaving in the morning.
Reporters asked them whether VanMinos had ever stayed at Zacher’s apartment.
“I’m not answering these questions,” Zacher said.
He repeated himself and walked out of the room.
As the interview continued, VanMinos would not respond to questions about why she was staying at Zacher’s apartment. She has a home in West Henrietta, a Rochester suburb about 90 minutes west of Syracuse.
The reporters told VanMinos about seeing her at Zacher’s and asked if she could explain or wanted to comment.
“Nope,” she said with her arms crossed, leaning back in her chair.
She was asked whether she had ever stayed overnight at Zacher’s.
“I’ve answered your question,” she said.
She was asked five times to explain her stays at Zacher’s, and refused each time. VanMinos did not respond to a message left on her home phone Saturday.
During the interview, VanMinos, 41, denied she and Zacher, 64, were having an affair.
In the interview, VanMinos and Drake were asked whether it would be a conflict if a school administrator was spending the night at the home of the superintendent who signed the administrator’s contract.
“I believe that people have personal lives above and beyond their work,” Drake said.
She said Friday that she had not read the tenure clause.
About an hour after the interview, Zacher called The Post-Standard. He said he would not take any questions and gave this statement:
“I totally deny having any inappropriate affair with Paula VanMinos. I deny that there was any impropriety in the negotiations of that contract that occurred early on in my time here, and there’s absolutely no relationship there. And any personal relationship I have with her has been above board and there is not an affair.”
Zacher hung up and did not respond to a phone message left immediately asking to explain VanMinos’ spending nights at his apartment.
Zacher lives in Whitesboro, about an hour to the east of Syracuse, but maintains the apartment in Skaneateles. He did not respond to a message left on his cell phone Saturday.
The school board called an emergency meeting Friday night after The Post-Standard interviewed Zacher and VanMinos. The board met in executive session to discuss personnel matters. Before that session, the board met briefly in public. Neither Zacher nor VanMinos, who both normally attend board meetings, were present.
Zacher is scheduled to continue as interim superintendent until the end of June. He would be the one, according to VanMinos’ contract, to decide whether to recommend the school board grant VanMinos preliminary tenure.
The school board approved VanMinos’ contract 6-3 at a meeting Feb. 2. Board member Brian Richardson said last week he voted against it because of “one particular clause in that contract,” but he would not say which one.
Richardson said last week he stands behind VanMinos “100 percent.”
“I believe that Paula is doing a great job under very demanding and stressful situation,” he said in a written statement.
Richardson’s reason for voting against the contract differs from the explanation board President Mary Alley gave at the time. She said the votes against the contract were directed at other matters contained in the same agenda item and not related to VanMinos’ contract.
Jordan-Elbridge School Board President Mary Alley (right) talks at a school board meeting on Feb. 9 as Paula VanMinos (left), the district's director of operations, and interim superintendent Larry Zacher listen. On Feb. 2, the school board voted 6-3 to approve a consent agenda that included VanMinos' contract.Alley did not return phone messages for comment. When contacted by email, she declined to be interviewed. Alley also declined to answer questions Friday night after the emergency meeting.
“It was the decision of the superintendent, in conjunction with the board of education that Mrs. VanMinos was a quality employee that we would like to retain,” Alley said three months ago. “Together, the three parties worked to negotiate a contract that would allow her to continue to work for the J-E school district.”
VanMinos said she told Alley in June that another school district had offered her a job. That prompted the school district to renegotiate her contract, VanMinos said.
Her new contract gave her more responsibilities and $21,000 more in salary. She’s been doing the work of the district’s suspended assistant superintendent, William Hamilton. As director of operations, VanMinos’ responsibilities include budget planning, preparing monthly financial reports and researching cost-cutting measures.
Alley has said VanMinos is saving the district $136,000 annually because it doesn’t have to pay three others whose tasks she has taken on: transportation supervisor, buildings and grounds supervisor and assistant superintendent for business and finance. The district is paying Hamilton for the assistant superintendent job while he’s on suspension.
Drake defended the terms of VanMinos’ contract.
“Is it bad that someone’s a good negotiator?” asked Drake, whose term ends next year.
The board members whose terms expire at the end of June are Alley, vice president Diana Foote and board member Jeanne Pieklik.
State courts have ruled that someone who’s denied tenure after their probationary period is over is effectively fired. The law says a school employee has to be either on probation or tenured with one exception: a district can agree to extend the probationary period for a year.
Along with the tenure clause, the contract calls for the district to pay VanMinos a full-year’s salary if her position is abolished. That also appears to be an inappropriate use of public money, Riccio said.
That payment would be a severance, which typically isn’t given to an employee whose job is abolished because the district’s trying to save money, he said.
“This smacks of ... there’s something wrong here,” Riccio said. “They’re treating this employee so favorably.”
Other provisions in the contract are more lucrative than other employees’ contracts in the district, according to Dominick and a review by The Post-Standard. Among them: VanMinos is allowed to be reimbursed for more unused vacation days than others; she gets disability insurance while other employees don’t; and when she retires, the district pays half her salary into an annuity.
VanMinos conceded that some of the provisions weren’t in other contracts she’d seen, but she maintains the retirement pay is in others.
Dennis O’Hara, a lawyer for the three suspended or fired district employees, said he plans to file a court action asking a judge to declare VanMinos’ contract null and void because the tenure clause is financially onerous on taxpayers. He said he plans to file that request this week on behalf of school district taxpayers as part of another court action against the district.
VanMinos was hired by J-E in October 2008, one month after she was fired as assistant business manager with Monroe BOCES, in the Rochester area. She was fired because she did not take the civil service exam required for her position, according to documents from that district.
VanMinos said Monroe BOCES officials told her she didn’t have to take the exam because they were changing her job title. She said whether she was terminated “depends on your definition of that.”
Read other stories about Jordan-Elbridge school district
Staff writer Catie O’Toole contributed to this report. John O’Brien can be reached at [email protected] or 315-470-2187. Fernando Alfonso can be reached at [email protected] or 315-470-3039.
Contract between Paula VanMinos and the Jordan-Elbridge School District